It's not about the diet - most diets actually work, if you can stick with them for the rest of your life, but that's a huge if. CICO or keto or IF or carnivore or whatever, doesn't matter. Permanent weight loss requires the much harder task of fundamentally changing your brain's relationship to food. The only way that happens is through practice and painful failure.

You do have control over your weight. But losing fat and maintaining a lean body will be one of the hardest things you ever do.

I've been on this journey for over ten years now -- basically on the practice and pain path you describe. But it wasn't until I read Allen Carr's "Good Sugar Bad Sugar" book that I began to mentally relate to sugar and carbs like any other significant addictive drug like nicotine or heroin. The sugar and carbs are not just passive calories that you ingest -- they actively affect how your brain and body relate to food.

Once you make that mental switch, then it's much easier to drop and stay off them. I mean who would say it's okay to have heroin cheat days?

There are other ways to do this, but they require you to leave your world behind. For many, their environment is what built and maintains their unhealthy relationship to food.

For me, the day I left Texas was the day I started dropping pounds. Then, the day I left Utah for London was the day I dropped even more pounds. Then, the day I started running was the day I began approaching my lower limit (likely bordering into unhealthy body fat % on marathon race day).

The biggest challenge of you and the commenter above you was that you were swimming up stream. Hopping into a stream that leads away from fat behavior, instead of toward it can do much of the work for you.

I fully appreciate that's a luxury, but it's something people who have a choice should consider.

Overthinking it and coming up with horse shit reasons why it's totally fine to eat the amount you're eating and blaming some external factor (e.g. one's body) is the problem.

I find it supremely hilarious that you refer to the person's own body as an external factor.

>I find it supremely hilarious that you refer to the person's own body as an external factor.

It's external in the sense that we have no control over our DNA, which is implicitly being blamed when one speaks of one's own predisposition towards weight gain. It's not that funny.

Operate at an energy deficit and I guarantee you'll lose weight.

Is it going to feel horrible? Hell yes.

A Pound is 3,600 calories. I can easily eat 1,800 calories over my maintenance requirement.

Do you think in one year I am going to gain 180 pounds or .5 pounds per day?

I'd actually be surprised if there's much correlation between understanding physics and having one's weight under control.

Neither your comment nor your parent comment add anything except noise to this discussion.

Weight, health, and fitness are all _correlated_, but sometimes in ways that aren’t intuitive and that western society’s fat-shaming (of which the “just eat less” mantra is a prime example) completely misses the point.

That said, we are not adding noise. We are giving the physics level truth. It's like being told an answer, and being told to show the proof, in my opinion. The answer is to eat less calories, but working the problem isn't so simple. There are a ton of variables into how or why someone can't follow this regime, some valid, some probably not.

Starvation mode is vastly overstated.

I wonder why people in starving nations don't have this magical starvation mode, or glandular problems, or microbiomes that make them fat. Are we exceptional?

You might have to drink a _lot_ of coffee though because there's a lot of hours between morning and dinner. I have a coffee maker that brews right into an vacuum carafe (which keeps it hot up until dinner time) and I also have a yeti mug that keeps a single cup of coffee warm for ~1-2 hours, which helps me nurse fewer cups throughout the day.

1. Try eating more vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers, coleslaw, but watch for the sauces). They do a wonderful job a filling the stomach, but they would give you like 20x less calories than bacon or fries.

2. The weight you see on the scale is a combination of your fat, liquids retained by the body, food in your pipeline, etc. Based on my personal experience, the non-fat part (that goes away in the 1st week of dieting and easily gets back) can be up to 10-12 lbs. You need some model to account for it when watching your weight, otherwise it gets pretty depressive.

3. It's tough to keep high-calorie foods off every single day and it's tough to diet for weeks in a row. Having a moderate diet for 1 week every month, while eating a bit over for the rest 3 weeks is much more tolerable than the extremes.

4. Do portion control. The subjective pleasure we get from the food scales logarithmically with the amount, the calories scale linearly.

* Maintaining relationships with friends, family, and loved ones

* Excelling at their job

* Reducing bad habits(like drinking, tv watching, smoking, etc)

* Pursuing hobbies

* Raising children

And all of them have had to make significant sacrifices across the board to maintain their weight.

Edit: Saw your note below > "150+ lbs, the past decade"

I thought losing weight was about willpower and starving as well. But you can only keep that up for so long until your willpower breaks. Then I read this book, Allen Carr's "Good Sugar, Bad Sugar: Eat yourself free of sugar & carb addiction". It changed how I view things and now I no longer worry about how much I eat.

The key is in understanding that your hunger is driven by an addiction to sugar and carbs -- they're not what your body considers food so it always feels hungry. Change your diet and you no longer constantly feel hungry while still losing weight.

I've been eating a lower carb diet with portion control for more than 10 years now with little to no exercise. I recently changed into a low carb diet. Over this 10 year period I lost 30% of my body weight.

The only fad I've seen so far is the notion that practicing willpower and portion control while still eating sugar and carbs is a maintainable position.

Best of luck to you. But as others have noted, the rampant obesity in today's society is a recent problem - not something that happened in previous generations. What's different?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871403X1...

Take a look at the top 5 strongest men in the world. They spend their days working out and probably burn more calories in a day than I do in a week. They have big, strong muscles that are covered over by a layer of fat. Same is true of many manual laborers today - landscapers, roofers, builders.

http://theworldsstrongestman.com/athletes/

Compare that to body builders (work out, eat lower carb/sugar) or concentration camp prisoners who are underfed (whether they do labor or are almost entirely sedentary).

https://www.google.com/search?as_st=y&tbm=isch&as_q=concentr...

https://www.google.com/search?as_st=y&tbm=isch&as_q=body+bui...

Comparing the groups (and my own experience) convinced me that eating (rather than exercise) is >80% of how much fat you will carry.

I'd say one of the biggest differences today is that sugar and carbs have become well accepted highly addictive drugs in our society. Feeling down? Go treat yourself to some ice cream! Is it any different with nicotine or heroin addicts?

I look at obese people in the same way that I look at nicotine or heroin addicts. It's not their fault, they're just normal people who are unfortunately caught in the tractor beam of addictive substances and they may not even know it. I didn't know it when I was a carbaholic. I thought I was fine -- didn't really connect my hangry episodes with withdrawal symptoms.

I think most people fail because they expect immediate results and can't stay consistent because they go too hard for immediate results. On WW when presented with an unhealthy meal option I would consider if it was really worth it giving how well I was doing, and I wanted to crush it on the scale every week. I think for me that was the most important driving force to not making bad decisions like eating a pile of cookies. People think they have to sit there depriving themselves with a pile of lettuce but that is exactly what WW discourages. You can eat whatever but it has a cost. For me I was happy eating lean good food like a small sirloin steak with some broccoli.

Why??

> and weigh myself everyday

Why???? Every week AT MOST. And even then, TRACK THE LONG TERM TREND.

> I can't keep food in my house

Why??????????????????

YOU NEED FOOD TO SURVIVE. You need food in your house to PREPARE MEALS that YOU PLAN. A caloric deficit WILL lower your ENERGY LEVELS ... BUT you are NOT REQUIRED to be HUNGRY because of it.

----

Don't listen to me. I'm not your doctor. I'm not your nutritionist.

When I wake up in the morning, I know I can eat one of a couple different meals. I can have oatmeal, or french toast, or pancakes, or greek yogurt. All of these meals are pre-planned so that I know how many calories I will consume. For a snack I can have almonds or a 100 cal ice cream bar or any one of my other foods. For lunch I'll eat a big salad or greek yogurt or maybe some canned salmon/tuna with blah blah blah.

The point is. I don't track my calories because I have a meal PLAN. I don't just jaunt off to a restaurant, """track""" 1500 calories, and say to myself "Welp guess I'm going hungry for the next 12 hours". That's STUPID.

I have anywhere from 400-600 calories for breakfast. 300-400 for lunch. 400-600 for dinner. 400ish dedicated to snacks. That puts me at about 2000 calories for the day. That's maintenance level (basically, it will vary from person to person). To gain weight I ADD another 150-300 calories meal. To lose, I ease up on snacks or go for the low end numbers on my 3 major meals (400+300+400 == 1200 + 400 snacks == 1600 == caloric deficit).

I'm NEVER hungry. The worst part of a diet is the lower energy levels (drink some coffee). NOT THE HUNGER because there is NONE. Eat a pound a spinach. You will not be hungry!

The times I have successfully managed my weight were when I was able to control what I brought through the door of my apartment. I would always eat before going to the grocery store to reduce impulse buying. With the exceptions of fruit and veggies I aspired to never bring anything through the door that I could eat without having to cook in some way.

My weight has grown since I got married to a woman with a metabolism that allows her to snack seemingly with impunity and who can be in the same apartment with snack food and not feel drawn to it.

If I am aware of delicious food in the house it can be a constant mental battle to not go eat it. In the morning when I'm full of energy it's easy to resist but late in the day when I'm stressed by work or whatever else my reserve of restraint is much less and I often give in.

I've been following microbiome research with interest. I understand that certain gut bacteria have the ability to stimulate the vagus nerve basically to get the kind of food they like. I am battling an enemy that has a direct line to my lizard brain.

The only solution is to not bring that food in the house.

To keep myself honest. I've tried not tracking it and it was too easy to slip into bad habits over time.

>> and weigh myself everyday

> Why???? Every week AT MOST. And even then, TRACK THE LONG TERM TREND.

To keep myself honest. Only weighing myself once a week it was two easy to slip into bad habits because I couldn't see the consequences of my choices for a whole week. Even then, it was too easy to pass off gains as water weight, which can fluctuate 5lbs quite easily over the course of a day. By weighing every day I get more data to work with which allows me to more easily plot the trend over time and be mindful of the effect of fluid retention or loss.

>> I can't keep food in my house

> Why??????????????????

Ugh. Look, I'm sure for you it's real easy to keep yourself from just walking in to the kitchen and making food when you're bored, but like many people who got fat I am a food addict, so it isn't easy for me. If there is food in my house, I will eat it. Mindlessly. Casually. It's too much temptation that I have to expend mental effort to fight. By making sure I only have just enough food to get through the weekend I ensure that the barrier to eating is much higher and it's easier to fight temptation.

I also keep just enough food at work to get through the work week. Work is harder regardless, because people bring in free food all the time and there are convenient vending machines.

> YOU NEED FOOD TO SURVIVE. You need food in your house to PREPARE MEALS that YOU PLAN.

No shit Sherlock. I keep just enough food to meet my plan and no more. Moreover, my plan is the same every single week so I spend as little time thinking about food as possible. I even prepare meals at work thanks to my microwave steamer, the single best decision I ever made for eating better.

> A caloric deficit WILL lower your ENERGY LEVELS

Yes, which has a corresponding effect on one's ability to exercise their willpower. This is well documented.

> ... BUT you are NOT REQUIRED to be HUNGRY because of it.

First of all, I disagree, because in order to lose weight your body literally needs to eat itself. Secondly, I'll repeat that I am a food addict. Hunger is not a requirement of being tempted to eat.

> Don't listen to me. I'm not your doctor. I'm not your nutritionist.

Physicians and nutritionists, in my considered opinion, give only slightly better advice than randos on the internet. I am not in danger of accidentally listening to you, I assure you.

> The point is. I don't track my calories because I have a meal PLAN. I don't just jaunt off to a restaurant, """track""" 1500 calories, and say to myself "Welp guess I'm going hungry for the next 12 hours". That's STUPID.

What happens is I eat my planned meal, for which I track the calories, and then I go hungry anyway. That's just how it is and telling people that they don't have to be hungry to lose weight is one of the reasons people fail at weight loss.

> I'm NEVER hungry.

That must be nice.